This is a symposium about -alities. Now commonplace, terms like temporality, governmentality, positionality, and so on have made their way into literary studies and the humanities more broadly. We choose to consider not "environment," say, but "environmentality" in order to avoid sounding monolithic or reified. But if these terms are more than academic politesse, it is time to revisit what we mean by monolithic, reified, and, of course, -ality. The broadening of scholarship beyond the human now underway requires that we take a fresh look at the poetics and politics of interpretation, whether or not our scholarship studies the nonhuman explicitly. At the precise moment at which we are being told to look “outside,” we need to get clear again: what is this outside? Is it thinkable? Can we say what we have been saying in such a climate?

Panel Description
Each culture has its own conception of gender, and those conceptions are often intertwined with ideas about appropriate sexuality. Whenever there are norms, there are always already opportunities for both exclusion and subversion. Those who have been othered and, by extension, excluded may either be perceived as mad because they lack normative gendered traits or can experience psychic trauma, which can drive them to madness. In either case, gender non-conformists are often viewed as crazy. Conversely, subversion can be a powerful force for those who have been deemed other to exert their agency and the validity of their othered identities. Though gender ideology evolves over time and across cultures, there are always those that fall outside what is considered normal. Some embrace those othered identities while some cannot cope with their own uniqueness.

Papers in this panel explore the normative gender constructs of their respective texts and the characters whose traits lie outside said norms. By exploring the perceived or actual madness of characters who express othered gender traits, these papers describe the ways in which literature, across nations and across periods, critiques ideologies of normative gender.